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TOT013: Edu reading lists + more Twitter Takeaways

Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways is a weekly-ish post (and sometimes a podcast!) bringing together some of the fascinating things that Ollie read throughout the week-ish! Find all past posts of Teacher Ollie’s Takeaways here,

The mother of all reading lists

For many teachers starting out (or even those who have been in the game for a while) the question ‘Where should I start with respect to educational research?’ is a super important one. Of all of the reading lists I’ve come across, this one by @HFletcherWood is probably the best. Harry’s criteria for selection were:

Well-evidenced or well thought through

Clear and well-written (at least relatively)

Formative and thought-provoking

Well worth a look, as well as the link to Robert Coe’s reading list that Harry includes at the bottom of his list.

Dylan Wiliam on CLT. How could you miss it?

Dealing with traumatic times

Within the past month or so there have been a number of attacks that have been beyond unsettling for those in related communities and the global community more broadly. Should we talk about these things in our classrooms? If so… how? Here’s a handy resource.

resources to support tchrs in difficult conversations about events, whether in the UK, the Philippines, or Syria. https://t.co/EdYdyY4ADh

Feedback… Feedback?

“If I had to reduce all of the research on feedback into one simple overarching idea, at least for academic subjects in school, it would be this: feedback should cause thinking.”

This article includes a thought provoking discussion of just how muddy the waters of feedback are… well worth a look.

Is Greg Ashman really changing his mind on group work?

Yep, but not in the direction I first thought when I read the title of his blog post. Here’s what he used to think…

Slavin surveyed the evidence on collaborative learning and found that it can be effective if two crucial conditions are in place; group goals and individual accountability. In other words, the groups need to be working towards some clearly defined objective and everyone in each group needs to be held accountable.

Here’s what he thinks now…

So I am starting to change my mind. I am not sure that the evidence for the effectiveness of group work, even if implemented under Slavin’s conditions, is sound.

Problem solving… complicated or complex?

An interesting article.
on this topic by Robert Kaplinsky. Something that particularly tickled my fancy was his clarification of the two terms:

the main difference between complicated and complex situations is that complicated situations can be well defined and have all possibilities accounted for while complex situations have so many changing variables that you can never account for them all. This doesn’t stop people from trying though with sometimes hilarious results.